So it turns out sleeping after a Penn and Teller show is impossible. Your brain’s just far too fizzy.

The whole show (as the previous post probably indicates) was an inspiration (except, if I’m honest, the nailgun bit, which I’m pretty sure any competent musician could have pulled off for real after a bit of practice and a deep breath). What got me thinking about my own work, though, was the people-wrangling.

The night before, I and the other creators at the WonderLab had run Couple Up for an invited audience. Couple Up was a game we’d created that very afternoon, and only tested once, and was full of imperfections (some deliberate, many not). Running it was a process of getting 30 people, who hadn’t come to play, to understand, perform and enjoy a complex physical, social game simultaneously. It went, all things considered, pretty well. But it was a bodge, and required an amount of on-the-fly rule evolution and bit of improv stage-management. As I spend more time designing and running meat-space games, I’m only beginning to learn the dark art of introducing games to players and facilitating and shaping their experience. Godding Werewolf is one thing, getting 30 people to make choices and speak to actors and move around rooms is many orders of magnitude tougher.

So where to turn to for advice on how to take someone who doesn’t know the rules and get them to do the things you need them to do? I’d never thought of how abundantly obvious it is: magicians. Magicians’ whole careers often depend on their ability to pull people from the audience and get them to do the right thing. I’d thought before about what they might have to teach videogame designers, but hadn’t thought about how valuable they’d be for training physical game runners.

Leaving the show tonight, I had the chance to talk the idea over with Stuart Nolan, who extended the idea to specifically learning from busker magicians. Rather than swapping magic tips, he’d had the chance to learn crowd management from buskers. It’s crucial to learn how to stop the audience applauding, apparently, because applause signals an ending, and so people start to leave. But how do you perform a trick in such a way that it amazes and delights people but disinclines them to applaud? Stuart Nolan knows, but I don’t, and now I want to learn.

It’s probably a better use of my excitement-induced insomnia than trying to get a hang of the needle trick.

Stall seats for Penn and Teller’s return to the UK after a 15 year absence. I’m not going to try to do justice to the 19 impossible, beautiful things they showed us all. Nor am I going to try to explain them – I’m taking Penn’s advice and living in the happy persistence of mystery, rather than clutching at unfounded rationales. Go, if you at all can. There do seem to be a few tickets left.

Mostly, it made me think about making and running games. More than the magic, what astonished me tonight was the quality of the workmanship on show. The staging, the timing, the writing, the costumes, the performances, the precision, the invention, the experimentation. Understanding the man-hours that had gone into the evening was impossible – understanding the man-hours that had gone into each individual trick equally so. And, while Penn’s mischevious promises that the nail-guns and tank-drownings weren’t actually dangerous were persuasive, it was perfectly clear that the level of precision required to bring the show off were astonishing.

And so I left with one over-riding feeling: that everything I’ve ever made is a sack of shit. And I’m proud of the things I’ve made. Proud of the people I’ve worked with – of their talent and their diligence and flair. But nothing I’ve ever made came anywhere close to the standards of excellence I saw on stage tonight. Even Royal Opera House performances, my previous benchmark of enacted perfection, don’t quite cut it. My standards simply aren’t Penn and Teller’s standards. They wouldn’t work with me. They shouldn’t work with me. I accept a margin of error, and a rate of failure, which they wouldn’t. They’re six sigma – beyond six sigma – and I’m two-and-a-bit-of-sellotape-and-fingers-crossed sigma.

Most of us are, to be honest. Most of us accept – particularly when we’re making digital, coded, things, that there will be bugs and flaws and things we bravely trumpet as ‘working as intended’.  But seeing tonight’s show reminded me of reading the account of the way NASA code – of how you make things actually work, rather than just mostly work. It’s easy, it turns out – it’s just agonisingly slow, expensive and thorough.

Penn and Teller’s example hasn’t left me daunted, however. It’s impossible not to be inspired by their warmth and hard-earned pride. I don’t want to make things like their things, but I do want to make things as well as they do, and it makes me happy that it’ll take me the rest of my life to learn how.

After a frankly frenzied week of preperation, the splendid Richard Lemarchand’s GDC microtalk session is finally over. I know I’m not supposed to say this cos I was part of it, but it was by far my favourite session of the conference so far. So many brilliant ideas coming at you so fast! It was like the Dopler Effect in reverse.

I just wanted to tip my hat again to Leigh Caldwell, whose blog shows how he applies his expertise in behavioural economics to games and other interesting systems, and whose help was invaluable in putting my talk together. Other references for the talk are on Delicious, tagged GDC10Margaret.

The game is afoot… http://www.221b.sh

I promise I’ll stop talking about story sometime soon, but I woke up today with an actual spike of How Can I Have Been So Stupid? embedded between my eyes. Often when I’m inveighing against story, I’m actually warning people off plot and dialogue, since both of these are things games often do badly. The problems with plot are pretty clear – the challenge of keeping things credible over a 10-, or 20-, or 80-hour game run, the tensions interactivity can bring, the banality that the superhero-ness of your central character often encourages – but I have been wondering of late why dialogue is so hard to get right. Dialogue is, after all, a well-understood problem. Finding good script writers is hard, certainly, but a long way from impossible, and there are agencies and commissioners with buckets of experience in pointing you to serious talent. So why – and I’m sure it’s coincidence that I’ve just been playing InFamous – is it so rare to find dialogue in games that isn’t, frankly, wretched.

I was chewing this over when I ended up on the Wikipedia page for Mad Men, which quotes Don Draper’s pitch to Kodak that so resonantly closes the first season:

Nostalgia.
It’s delicate, but potent…
Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.
It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device… isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, forwards.
It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.
It’s not called the Wheel.
It’s called the Carousel.
It lets us travel the way a child travels.
Around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

It’s the killer scene in a killer episode, but on paper it’s a strange beast. Definitely closer to poetry than prose, and highly controlled and yet florid at the same time. So what makes the difference? John Hamm makes the difference. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with games.

A good actor can save a bad line. Good actors can save an entire script full of bad lines, and film and TV actors are able to deploy their bodies and their faces as well as their voices to carry the day. Relying on voice alone is a taller order. Despite my devotion to Radio 4, and my addiction to The Archers (Woe for Matt and Lilian! Hooray for Tom and Brenda!), I find most radio drama hammy and wearing. Money Box Live is a more appealing listen than From Fact To Fiction.  And these are not less talented actors (I’m not even enjoying Simon Russell Beale as Le Carré’s Smiley, for heaven’s sake), nor necessarily less talented writers. It just seems to be harder to help dialogue shine without the visual cues. (Please, don’t think for a moment I’m denigrating radio – it has an intimacy and an intensity that TV, film and theatre can never match. But scripted drama seems to be something it doesn’t do as well as it can documentary, discussion, prose and poetry.)

The trouble is, of course, that game voice actors have it even harder than radio voice actors. Our digital actors are almost universally acting against the talents of the people supplying their voices, rather than with. Gammy animation, glassy eyes, bad path-finding, tongueless mouth-holes: we still have a lot of problems to combat before we even level the playing field, let alone produce actor-avatars which can help save patchy writing.

So that, with my apologies, is the blindingly obvious revelation that I had this morning, a decade after everybody else. Dialogue is one of the single hardest things there is to write, and games are the single hardest environment to write it for. No wonder we struggle.

So, over from my home-from-home Offworld, I wrote a piece about the majestic God Hand, particularly praising its adaptive difficulty. The more dudes you pummel successfully, the more dudes attack you. The more you get pummelled by dudes, the more other dudes leave you alone. It’s a system I like because it preserves the absolute challenge – you can only go toe-to-toe with other player’s high scores by pushing for the highest difficulty – while ensuring progress through the game is possible for poorer players. And it does it all transparently, letting you see what difficulty level the game is setting for you and therefore allowing you to make decisions and plan strategies around how hard you want the experience to be.

It’s kicked off quite an interesting debate, which seems to be focused around two issues. The first is whether or not adaptive difficulty dilutes the purity of the challenge, and therefore the satisfaction of victory. As is so often the case, the right answer to that conundrum is the cop-out answer: it depends. There are undoubtedly games where you want unwavering, unalterable hardness: lines in the sand you can measure yourself against. Sometimes it’s more important to guarantee progress. I had a rather marvellous meeting yesterday for a sex education game I’m helping out on, and its designer very astutely pointed out that it’s pretty much essential that everyone who plays the game is able to finish it. No use clueing teens in to the perils of herpes if they get stuck before they find out how to spot syphilis. What prompted me to write yesterday’s column, though, was delight at how often truly hardcore games manage to balance those two needs. It’s not that God Hand lets you coast, flailing aimlessly through a challenge-free experience. It uses its adaptive difficulty to lure you in to harder fights, teaching you as you go. It’s the perfect teacher, constantly advancing the goalposts to stretch your skills, whatever your natural level.

The second issue was best summed up by commenter Inverse Square:

But damn, to give in to the desire for a power fantasy is a terrible thing to do. Escaping from reality is nice, but it’s indefensible. To flatter it, to trade in it, to treat it like it’s useful is wrong. It’s helping no-one; it’s teaching you nothing.

Are all games just power-fantasies? By no means (although – fair cop – I did say they were in that piece, mostly cos I was feeling a bit grumpy). They have long done much more to inspire, challenge, surprise and educate. Are some games just power fantasies? Yes, absolutely. And do I think that’s a bad thing? Sometimes. Sometimes I’m delighted to have a ready-made range of sand-castles I can kick over, oceans of virtual balloons I can rampage through with a pop-gun, virtual plates I can smash and virtual pencils I can snap. Often though, I go back to Geoffrey Miller’s eminently scary article (you’ll need to do a text search for his name to find his entry)  from a few years ago which posits that the eventual downfall of all intelligent civilisations will be our seduction by fitness fakers – virtual constructs which gives us the feeling of achievement without actually achieving anything. The natural extension of the argument? That videogames are the reason we haven’t got to Mars, and the reason that other advanced alien life-forms haven’t got to Earth. We’re all too busy playing God Hand. Sorry ’bout that.

Limbering up for my L4D playdate this evening reminded me of the rather brilliant Left 4k Dead which did the rounds some time ago, which in turn made me think of other brilliant tiny games.

Grandaddy, of course, is Wolfenstein 5k, but you might have trouble getting it to run in your space-faring, jet-pack-toting browser-of-the-future. Current darling is the 5k Lunar Lander, where Seb Lee-Delisle shows off by doing first a straight remake and then a 3D version in under 5120 bytes, as part of a competition run by the rather awesome sounding  £5 App club. Which just goes to show that 5k is probably a bit generous, surely the thinking behind the annual Java 4k compo, which this year has a reworking of PixelJunk Eden, some improbably lavish atmospherics, courtesy of 4bsolution, and a nice crisp Tetris-meets-that-colour-clearing-game-I-don’t-know-the-name-of.

4k starting to look a bit too generous? Then why not take a stab at Tetris in 500 bytes? Sick of all this reductivist retroism? Then check out what 432k can get you, which turns out to be blowing up Battersea Power Station, complete with smoke and sound, in A New Zero, which also wins my favourite-game-FAQ-ever award.

Still to big for your tastes? Then fetch your reading glasses and head over to Defender of the Favicon. If you get there and you can’t spot the game, then you’ve rather missed the tiny, tiny point.

I’m about half-way into my Great 2008 Game Catch-up, which means I’ve reached Mass Effect, which I know is strictly speaking a 2007 release, but I’ve been avoiding up till now because I have a phobia about weird teeth – too big, too matte, too white, too gappy – in games, and I felt strongly (and rightly) that this would trigger it.
There’s lots to say about it, of course, precious little of which hasn’t been said already. I am rather impressed with its ability to crash in frequent and deeply symbolic ways. Getting trapped in the pause menu felt like some big fat ludic meta-gag, and the way the lighting dropped out when I first boarded the Normandy as captain, meaning I was left blundering in the dark at the moment when I was supposed to be assuming command, was borderline poetry.

If there was one bit of the game I was expecting not to surprise me, though, it was the sex bit, seeing as I’d seen a dozen videos and read a hundred news reports and blog rants. But, jeepers! No wonder everyone was so exercised by it. It happens so early on! It’s so amazingly perfunctory! You get – or at least I got – precisely no choice in it! She read my fortune badly, I said ‘is that it?’, or something else which I had never considered could serve as a come-on, and within seconds, we’re hard at it. Yet again, in a game that’s supposed to be all about choice, all about exploring moral depth, I’m giving a complex, nuanced palette of options about whether or not to sign an autograph, and no autonomy whatsoever when it comes to life’s little trifles, like fighting and fucking. Give it ten years and people are going to be suing for virtual rape when game designers force sexual encounters on player-made avatars, mark my words. Acutally, give it five.

That isn’t really what surprised me, though. What surprised me was that I expected to be annoyed by the anondyne cop-out of what’s actually shown, of the blue hand banging inelegantly against the wall. Games with mature ratings (or even 12s from the capable-of-understanding-context-and-presentation BBFC) ought to be able to find more honest and more natural ways of showing what happens when a man and a space consort love each other very much. But what I discovered, of course, is that that’s not what’s happening, because with me in the room are my new best friends Urdnot Wrex and Tali’Zorah nar Rayya. Are orgies more or less stressful with people you barely know, I wonder? Will we, by the 22nd century, have evolved beyond the need for a white wine spritzer and some awkward small talk to kick things off? So of course Bioware don’t dare pan below the wrist. Who knows what’s happening down there? Do krogans have that carapace all over, do you think? Do quarians even have mouths? Is Shepherd using his d-pad commands – pull back, pull back! focus your assaults here! – to co-ordinate it all? What would have happened if I’d unlocked Intimidate before I went in?

I spend a lot of time arguing for more sex in more games; it’s downright perverse that games don’t reflect something which is such a key component of the human condition. It’s probably for the best, though, if we don’t start with non-consensual inter-species gang-bangs. Especially if they’ve got those freaky teeth.

This sometimes happens: I woke up mad at something I read a week ago. Today, it was Chris Bateman’s measured, interesting, informed article positing that a game has never – could never – make you cry. It’s not at all his fault. The distinction he makes between games as play, and games as systems is an interesting one, and his observation that games make people cry not through systems and rulesets and interactions themselves, but through the stories which are embedded within them, is sound.

What makes me angry – even in my sleep, it would seem -  is that we seem as incapable from moving on from the ‘can-we-make-people-cry’ debate as we are from the ‘are-games-art’ debate. I ranted about both before, in magazines and conference halls and pubs and railway sidings and on the internet, so I’ll try and keep it brief, but come on. Really? Can’t we leave it behind? The last group of people I encountered so dead set on making people cry were the boys in my class in primary two who had a dead frog in a matchbox they showed to all the girls. Can’t we aim a bit higher? Making people cry is not synonymous with high art, and it’s not synonymous with a deep and valuable emotional response.

I’ve been waiting all year to go to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate, and I’m not expecting it to make me cry. I am expecting to be ambushed by memories of things I thought or hoped forgotten. I am expecting to find solace and some strange kind of sustenance in the colours and contrasts that he painted. I am expecting the rhythms and patterns that I see to change how I think about the rhythms and patterns of my own life, and of my own thoughts. I am expecting to leave with a sense of wonder, melancholy and gratitude towards this man I never met, who died before I was born, who yet took the time to leave these treasures behind for me. In short, I’m expecting it to be moving, enriching, challenging. I’m expecting to be not quite the same person when I come out that I was when I went in. All with out story, all without tears.

Tears shouldn’t be our goal. Stories don’t need to be our tools. The majority of art forms don’t rely on narrative for their emotional impact. Stop and think about that for a second. The games industry tends to draw on such an amazingly limited roster of inspirations that it’s easy to forget it. But our obsession with linear, story-based – word-based, even – non-participatory art at the expense of all the other forms makes life so much harder for games, and it makes me crazy. I swear, next GDC I’m going to set myself up behind a table in the lobby with a huge pile of rubber bands and a huge pile of Jelly Tots, and each delegate, as they come in, is going to get a band on their left wrist and a handful of sweets in their right pocket. And then, all week, every time they hear the word ‘film’, ‘book’ or ‘TV show’, they have to give themselves a snap. And everytime they hear the world ‘painting’, ‘theatre’, ‘sculpture’, ‘opera’, ‘architecture’, ‘comics’*, ‘dance’, ‘music’ or ‘poetry’, they get a sweetie. Two, if they say it rather than hear it. But goddamit, we’re not the only people trying to create emotionally resonant experiences in environments that aren’t kind to linear narratives. Landscape gardeners talk with great sensitivity and great ambition about how they want visitors to their gardens to feel. Typographers can – and do, and have, and will again – talk for hours about the emotional resonance of difference fonts, of how different approaches to typesetting can totally change the mood and tone of a piece before you’ve even read a word. The world knows a lot about how to do this stuff, and all that knowledge is just there, lying about in galleries and on radios and along boulevards, for us to plunder.

So please, stop trying to make me cry, before you drive me to tears. But do keep trying to make me feel.

* I know comics are narrative-led, but I like them too much to not give people sweeties when they talk about them. And they’re still more useful to games than films, books, or TV.

Look away now, those who are made easily envious of animated favicons: my new column has launched on Boing Boing’s new game site, Offworld. It’s called One More Go, and it’s about the games I can’t stop going back to, and why I can’t stop going back to them. To my enormous surprise, this one turned out to be about New York Times Crosswords, although it really shouldn’t have been a surprise, because it’s been a constant companion pretty much every since it came out.

More surprisingly, I didn’t write any of the things I mean to write about it. I got, it’s fair to say, a bit distracted. What I was really planning to bang on about was some very different stuff, namely:

Crosswords are the perfect expression of how games are about the relationship between game-maker and game-player! We don’t talk about this nearly enough in mainstream videogames, but one of the reasons I’ve always loved them is the feeling that I’m playing an experience which has been crafted for me by someone I’ve never met. It’s like the best Valentine’s Day present ever: something that someone has spent years of their life on, designed to do nothing more than make you happy. And the odd bodged clue in NYTC highlights that very effectively – it makes you acutely conscious of the human being at the other end of this experience. It’s why I’ve always been more interested in single-player games than multi-player games; I’ve always been more interested in beating the master of the game than another of its participants. And this seems to be a culture crosswords share. People who regularly play cryptic crosswords have a strong sense of connection with the people who set them – people who they’ve never met, but who have, over decades in some cases, entertained, challenged and educated them. If you think I’m over-stating the case, then keep your eyes peeled for the return of BBC4′s How To Solve A Cryptic Crossword, which has infuriatingly just dropped off iPlayer, but which does a lovely job of summing up how intense the relationship can be between players and makers. Or doers and setters, or whatever the right crossword terminology would be.

Crosswords were initially vilified in almost exactly the same way games are! Namely, for being a waste of time and a passing fad. Wikipedia has most of the best quotes, so I won’t regurgitate them all here, but purely in the services of irony, here’s The New York Times itself railing against them in 1924 (they’re younger than you think, crosswords). Sound familiar?:

 ”[the] sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport… [solvers] get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.”

Crosswords embed really complex cultural variations within one very simple ruleset! One of the reasons I’ve stuck with NYTC for so long is that, as a UK crossworder, it’s so alien to me. The simple differential between UK and US crossword grids – US ones have fewer black square, so almost every letter of every word has to be in another word – means that US crosswords have to use much more unconventional words and slang phrases. UK crosswords are extremely orthodox by comparison. But then UK cryptic crosswords seem to be far more complex and traditional than their popular US counterparts (although I think some of the more esoteric US cryptics give them more than a run for their money). So, even before you get to the actual cultural context of the clues (and, let me tell you, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit to realise that a ‘Thanksgiving sidedish – 3 letters’ might be ‘yam’), there’s cultural data embedded in the ruleset. I love that you can tell a UK crossword from a US one just by looking at it. I wish we could still do that with videogames.

Final note: I’m not kidding about being stuck on that clue. Any takers?

 46 DOWN (6 letters): In cubbyholes (S blank R blank)